ABSTRACT
In the wake of the outbreak of World War II, the Indochinese Communist Party (ICP) command had left Vietnam in November, 1939, for the safety of the neighboring Chinese provinces. Although Dean Acheson was speaking of the Chiang Kai-shek government's loss of mainland China, that was precisely the case in Vietnam in 1945. Where the Chinese generals made their fatal mistake was in believing that they, in conjunction with their Vietnamese puppets, could control the ICP and maneuver it into docility. The Viet-Minh represented a reassuring minority in that government—surely no danger to the non-Communist majority and its Chinese backers. The "Provisional Government" created in 1944 in China was quietly forgotten as the Viet-Minh, on August 16, 1945, proclaimed, on the basis of the Tan Trao "national conference" held three days earlier, the creation of a National Liberation Committee of Vietnam.
